


The Cadmus Contract:

by TheLightdancer



Series: Justice Titans: Together! [2]
Category: DCU, DCU (Comics), Injustice: Gods Among Us
Genre: Alternate Universe, Clones if you will, Project Cadmus (DCU) is Evil, Suicide Squad as Family, The Injustice Characters appear but sort of
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-08-17
Updated: 2020-08-17
Packaged: 2021-03-06 00:02:33
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,549
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25960282
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheLightdancer/pseuds/TheLightdancer
Summary: In the wake of the World-Tree Conflict, Earth-TT-X is rocked from a relative period of peace when the Justice Lords and an attack by the Cyborg-Superman bring into existence the Myriad Protocols of Project Cadmus. Deathstroke the Terminator, frustrated by the Titans and the World-Tree Conflict upending his existing plan, is offered a role in Project Myriad, involving a young and vulnerable super named Tara Markov....
Series: Justice Titans: Together! [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1768033





	1. Chapter 1

PROLOGUE:

JUSTICE LORDS EARTH, EARTH-50:

 _I want to reiterate,_ said Raven, who looked squarely at the other Justice Lords. _This is not a good idea, and nothing good can possibly come of it._

Lord Superman scoffed. "Oh come on. You've helped us pacify the world, and we were wrong to underestimate how useful you could be, to be fair. The World-Tree Conflict showed us that much." 

Keeping her face still and her heart rate deliberately calm, Lady Raven nodded in turn. _Right, but you want to go to the very universe where the World-Tree Conflict was won. You want to face the Justice League of that world, all for a glorified pissing match to show them that our world's ways are better._

Lord Superman nodded with an amused smile. "Of course. They've seen some of the horrors that lurk beyond the Source Wall, and the other things that we remain on guard against. I can't imagine any context in which they would refuse our signal."

Lady Raven pinched her nose. _Clark, I have said my piece. You will go and do this thing, disregarding my warnings, and you will see exactly what it gets you._

Lord Superman snorted. and tapped his foot impatiently on the circle.

 _Very well,_ sighed Raven.

Her eyes glowed white and energy began to gather around Lord Superman and his fellows of the Justice Lords, who had remained quiet. None of the rest of them were so bold as to argue with the girl who would be sending them between universes. None of the rest of them could pull moons from the orbit around planets if they were in a bad mood, either. Only his cousin Kara could, and he'd locked her up in a special cell in the Blackgate prison, after the two had fought and she'd nearly overthrown him.

Her voice echoed with a strange resonance, a low and guttural growl intruding on the words, a small trace of her heritage, and her eyes seemed to burn with a red fire, though there remained only two of them. 

**_Azarath Metrion Zinthos...Carazon Rakashas Enderez...Vaserix Endrien Terra Terra Terra!_ **

****The light echoed and then with the last Terra, the world seemed to split in two and the Lords could not even find it in them to scream, and then there was silence, and a slight odor of brimstone.

 _Well, that was easy_ , murmured Raven.

Then she placed herself into a meditation posture and formed her soul-self. They were so foolishly trusting of a half-demon who had seen from her counterpart in the alternate universe could link worlds into a single iron fist. The flip side of that, and of relying on someone like her to send people into another universe was that they relied on a great deal of her power to keep the world they'd designed in order. Her Soul-Self left in the form of a vast bird that cast its shadow across a cowed United States, reaching the Blackgate prison in Gotham City, only a couple hundred miles away in the middle of the United States, but still.

Down the bird flew, down. The inmates moaned in terror at the kiss of its passing and the feel of the Demon in it, in a brief flash of four red eyes.

It came to a cell where a blend of red sun energy and simulated Kryptonite (for she was, after all, Lord Superman's cousin and he was too sentimental to risk killing his only blood kin off) held a woman in exhaustion, weakness and despair sapping her. She felt it, felt her.

Her eyes flashed with anger, only metaphorically.

"Come to kill me then?" she hissed.

 _No._ The single word echoed around her cell, and then the feathers of the bird lanced out, severing the green energy first, then the red.

Then a voice echoed:

_Azarath Metrion Zinthos! Ashazhe nashar Solis!_

A Sun rose in the Cell and Kara Zor-L felt the power of the Yellow Sun flow through her and she levitated from the ground in genuine pleasure, feeling more powerful than she had in the last eight months since that terrible battle with Kal after she'd flattened the rest of the so-called Lords. The Blackgate Prison officially called it an Earthquake, after a mishap in an experimental cell, for the fear of the Lords remained immense when they were absent. Kara Zor-L was free, and she hovered over the dreary smog-ridden clouds of Gotham City, welcoming the warm caress of the Sun. She was free, now. The newest member of the Lords had given her this. She needed......

A flash of green followed and she looked to her right.

"Hello, Sinestro," she spoke softly.

The Green Lantern hit his fist against his chest in salute, the way they used to do in old Krypton.

"Lady El," he said. "We have much to talk about."

"Yes, we do."

He formed a green sphere around her and they headed off to Oa.

EARTH-TT-X:

The Justice Lords would arrive, as it turned out, in a time when the entire Justice League, Raven included, were off-world and known to be off-world. They were, equally unknown, helping to mediate the latest dispute between Apokolips and New Genesis, one that had roped in the Guardians of Oa when both Apokolips and New Genesis had begun to turn their eyes to the vast Vegan system. It was a frustrating exercise, and one that would last for two more weeks after their arrival.

Things had remained peaceful since the Fifty-One worlds had departed, even the supervillains reluctant, at first, to resume their pattern outside of Gotham where the new Robin, Jason Todd, and the Batgirl kept a lid on a city where the first of the Rogues to resume their rampages were beginning to do so.

They had remained peaceful that is, until Hank Henshaw, who had spent a very long time resisting the will coded into his newly enhanced machine-flesh, the dual-voiced Thing that spoke of promises of power and glory and infinite majesty to one that could fly between planets and stars, awoke with his flesh eye as red as his mechanical eye.

With a robotic voice intoning "I am a God!" he rose into the sky and erupted out of his apartment, landing with a thunderous boom in the heart of Metropolis, near the Superman statue.

As his heat vision lanced out and hewed the statue in half, it lanced out far beyond that and began to tear into the Gotham City skyline. The crowd that had seen him began to turn and run in fear as he laughed and began to levitate upward.

Then a cold wind blew, redolent with an aura of brimstone, and the fires that burned from his eyes stilled.

Six beings stepped out from the light, beings who both were and weren't familiar. They were the Justice League, yet each wore suits of armor of deep black with smaller fields of white, the effect giving them the impression of being more near machine than Hank himself was and had become.

"You're not them," he laughed with a cold menace.

Lord Superman smiled with a cruel smile. "No, we're better."

Then with that Lord Superman moved in a blur to the Cyborg, whose right hand formed a vast blade and snarled:

"My first act as God was to cut his statue in two. My second shall be to murder you. When a Superman dies, the world stops."

Then the shoulder of Lord Superman hit his gut and the impact felt like a blow to flesh, leaving the Cyborg-Superman's mechanical-yet-skeletal jaw gaping from the pain. He snarled, his blade sparking with light that was neither truly light nor darkness, an Unlight reflecting that which had changed him.

"DIE!"


	2. The Lord and the Cyborg:

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Justice Lords Superman and the Cyborg-Superman have a long knock-down drag-out brawl. 
> 
> The young runaway princess, Tara Markov, encounters a man with an eyepatch who makes her a deal.

GOTHAM HARBOR, EARTH TT-X:

Tara Markov had not had the simplest life. It hadn't been a _bad_ one, really, even if she was the spare. She and her brother Brion, the two heirs of the throne of Markovia, both had the power inherited from their family to be masters of the Earth. It had been a secret before the rise of the Mystery-Men, the coming of the Martian Manhunter, and the overt emergence of superhumans following the rise of Superman and Batman. Now it was an open element, pun not intended. The Markovian royal family, one of the few remaining absolute monarchies in Europe, in a tiny country next to Luxemburg, were metahumans.

The first and the earliest, and it had been this as much as anything else that accounted for how a former Arch-duchy of the Holy Roman Empire had transformed itself into a monarchy under the Napoleonic reforming of Germany, and why the German Empire in the making's attempt to invade it in 1870 had produced the first of two real defeats it suffered. So her powers were not, in truth, secrets. It wasn't even being the spare that had brought her here, it was a dissatisfaction with the stultified air of a royal court in an age of democracy, with the idea that her life was living in a fishbowl as a glorified mascot with oversized gaudy palaces too large for the Justice League, let alone one metahuman to live.

She had taken a passage to America in a deliberately old style, preferring a ship to the idea of air travel. She hated parting from her element, but it would be more easily managed stowing away on a ship that transported agricultural goods she could hide with and between rather than the rest.

America was not quite a metahuman paradise, there were other countries where metahumans arose, lived, and did things that had nothing to do with being the superhero or the supervillain. Superheroes and supervillains, to be fair, were far from a Western hemisphere thing but even then, metahumans in America were weird. She looked forward to it. She knew the Justice League was off the Earth, so there was no risk of being caught by them.

Few people would have willingly come to a city like Gotham on its shadowy nights where literal demons and the more metaphorical kind that were the worst deeds of humanity wrought into a gruesomely gaudy set of theatrics were on the prowl. The ill-starred reputation of the city lived worldwide, and only the vigilantes of the Bat and his seeming associates kept the darkness at bay, after so long.

Tara Markov was not most people. In her lived the very power of the Earth itself, she was one of the few people on the planet, she believed, with the odds to face no less than the Devil's Daughter, the youngest member of the League, in equal terms and have greater than fifty percent odds to beat her. Against the Superman or his cousin, there were much poorer odds but that held true for just about damned near everything under the Sun. And in any event, she didn't really come here to get involved in the elements of America's bizarre culture.

Her ship made landfall and she snuck into the harbor.

Gotham always had this brooding majesty about it in pictures, reminding her of a relatively obscure kind of science fiction she'd become a fan of, in its German translations, in any event. It was like Nostramo, of that science fiction, except that where the shadowy world of the Night Haunter was something of a super-Gotham, Gotham was real. There was menace here, but an austere beauty in the strange architecture and the way the skyline lit the darkness with an almost eldritch beauty.

She'd been so lost in the reverie that she only noticed the people she bumped into when her nose hit a broad, if not muscular, chest and the body remained unaffected where she hit the ground.

"Watch where you're going, girlie," growled the man. He was a hulking thing, seemingly more nearly ape than man. He wore an old forties-style Zoot Suit, the Tommy Gun in his hands springing into practiced soldierly grip. He had on a clown mask, a thing that if she were other than who she was would have led to existential panic and fear. The minions of the Joker were the most feared in Gotham, for few dared work for a man likely to kill people for no reason other than it fit a spur of the moment joke. His compatriot likewise whirled around to see her and then he spoke in a high, nasal voice with a lisp.

"Hey, that's a nice girl. We could sell her for money."

Stout looked over to Slim.

'Well there is that. Boss always needs money, he's not picky with how he gets it."

Tara's eyes seemed wary, but her hands rested in her glove on the ground.

"All right, dear, let's go, then."

Her eyes flashed gold and the men felt the tremor in the ground, as she raised herself upright, lifting the asphalt beneath her.

"Fuck me, she's a meta!"

With that the crooks began to open fire but more asphalt was ripped, the bullets sapped of their potency by an impromptu asphalt-shield. The asphalt was worn by the firepower to a set of smaller things that she smiled cruelly, and then hurled them out at the crooks, who stared in blank bemusement at first and then never stared at anything again. She stared, blankly, as her asphalt set back, unevenly, in the torn road. The smell of the dead bodies, the offal stench of bowels loosed, the iron stench of blood, and the sight of their twitching open-eyed stares was enough that she went over to the alley near where the incident had happened and lost the lunch she'd barely held onto from the ship.

Soft clapping echoed in the alley and she froze.

Her head whipped around and she saw a man in a black and orange outfit striding out, two swords strapped onto his back. He was a tall man with a goatee, and an eyepatch, and his clapping was not sarcastic but sincere.

"Very well done. I'm afraid you can't stay here, not in the Bat's city. You don't know what the Batman or his cronies would do to you."

Tara's eyes were wide and she trembled. In broken English, she spoke:

"Don't trust you."

The one-eyed man's face was passive. "I would think less highly if you did. I know who you are, princess."

Her eyes flashed yellow and she raised one of the pieces of asphalt but as she raised it the man drew one of the guns tied to his side and fired a much heavier round (that rocked him back slightly with the recoil) that exploded the piece so finely that she wasn't sure she could control it.

"And I can counter your little tricks, if you try them."

The glow in her eyes stopped.

"It's not safe for girls like you to wander around Gotham at night, so if you don't want a bodycount large enough to arrange for a new stay in Arkham Asylum, I'd suggest you at least follow me. Or don't. I'm sure Dr. Arkham would welcome a new patient." 

His footsteps started and began to recede in the distance as she stood on the dark nights of Gotham in a broken street filled with broken bodies. For a moment that felt to her like a long moment, of discontent she stared in turn, then followed him.

METROPOLIS:

It had been in the afternoon when the Cyborg-Superman had come to Metropolis and toppled buildings with his heat vision.

Now it was after nightfall, and he found himself less the being that had arisen out of the final failure of his struggle to resist what he had become and more the man who had been there, once. He had fought this armored Superman for hours and that Superman showed no signs of exhaustion, keeping him in the air over Metropolis where he could not further damage the city. The Superman seemed as poorly adept as he was at fighting a foe equal in strength, but it didn't quite matter. His blades sparked against the super-strong hide of the alien, but it could not damage it.

His eyebeams matched those of Superman's own, and that was a stalemate. The main edge this Superman had was that he was far better at blending his strength with his speed, landing nine blows for every one the Cyborg landed, moving at such a speed the Cyborg could neither see nor fully detect what was moving with that blend of terrible power and dread swiftness. Each blow hit like a Mack Truck, a sequence of strikes that moved him around, left him never quite sure what direction it was coming from until it struck him.

He could guess by his own enhanced senses where the movements were coming from, even hear them. Yet he was slower in assimilating that into a reaction and more of his blows struck thin air than not.

Metropolis heard the bewildering set of thunderclaps in the air, and saw the flashes. It was a long and ugly battle, and even if a few thousand had died when the blasts ripped outward, at least Superman had returned and hurled him into the sky where there were sparks of whitish-golden light and rays of reddish energy that dotted the sky. They had some ideas just how fast Superman was, and how strong. The fight that reminded some of the more anime-minded Otakus of Dragon Ball save that this was real and it was over the skies of their own city was a reminder, in its own way, of just how small they were.

The Justice League, or perhaps one of the alternate Justice Leagues from that alternate universe, had busied itself with both repairing the damage and helping to clear up the mess. Only Diana could have helped with the fight against the Cyborg, but they had all seen the clash of Lords Superman and his cousin. She had been disturbed by this as much as the execution of Luthor, and it showed in that she limited herself to the ground, rather than trying to fight more directly. and winced occasionally.

The Cyborg felt fluid that was and wasn't blood flowing down his body, his flesh eye swollen beyond recognition.

The armored Superman was annoyingly unharmed, and smug.

"I told you I was better," he gloated, before a set of lightning-fast blows moved the Cyborg further up in the atmosphere. The cold brought frost around his body and the dropping fluids froze, his flesh-eye blinded.

Frost appeared on the armored Superman's armor, too, but it didn't seem to bother him the same way.

"For what it's worth, your counterpart in my world also went through this. The whole attempt to develop faster than light travel, being changed by the energies, and seeing his team destroy himself thing."

With that Lords Superman moved around him and then he felt that knee digging in his back and a grip of iron reaching around to his chest, his body feeling strain that made him feel still human. Yet he wasn't. He'd held on for hours against a version of Superman who had neither morals nor restraint, and....he was not done yet. His mechanical arm altered once more into a shape of tendrils, gleaming with a bit of the Unlight that had, bar the first strike, largely been avoided.

With a cold-half-skull like smile and vision only in his mechanical eye he reached around, the tendrils grabbing the armored Superman in a vice-grip, the other Superman making a brief sound of shock that was so grimly akin to something that a human would have made. The sound intensified with the grip and he yanked Superman, or the Superman, around with a powerful motion, and flew higher up past the clouds. The rays of the Sun caressed him and his swollen eye restored itself to a normal size and then burned with a terrible heat to match his mechanical one, as the other Superman felt the grip intensifying and cracks starting to spiderweb in his armor.

Your Hank Henshaw was altered by another dimension. I met a God to the Gods, and she remade and rewove my flesh. She made me a weapon, a thing to lay low worlds. A Superman to Supermen. Better? 

He scoffed.

I refused to fight past a point before, when I was too weak to take her gifts. Now I am strong, now I am rebuilt. You're as pitiful as I am and you fancy yourself mighty. What are you supposed to be? A Superman that kills? Is that supposed to be strength, boy?

"Boy? I'm two years older than you!"

And yet your mindset is that of a child. Killing is strength. The goddess that remade me envisioned a world without death, of immortality for everyone, the most treacherous of concepts erased forever more. A world where there would be no killing, and nothing.....

Part of his metallic body grew out as a sharp spike that had a wicked edge and more of that light.

To fear.....

The light enhanced as the blade dove down and cut along Lords Superman's cheek, drawing a line of bright red blood.

From you!

Then the tendrils hurled him downward and the Cyborg moved, empowered by the Sun, and collided with him, hurling him down. They were moving seemingly toward Metropolis but overshot it by nearly three hundred miles, landing just outside Midvale with a tremendous crunch and a dust cloud, and an impact registered on Richter Scales worldwide.

The Cyborg raised himself to his feet, the half-frozen and now half-melted blood and other, altered substances streaking along his altered flesh shaping his substance in a hue more like the vengeful revenant he was than the last son of Krypton he resembled. The mechanical arm now shifted from the blade to a great hammer, one sparking with that same energy as he laughed.

You are nothing but a spiteful child pretending to be a man!

"Burn."

The singular word left him puzzled and then the heat vision blazed with a power and a force that he'd never imagined, colliding with his altered flesh with a power he'd never imagined. He fell over backwards, and then a set of powerful further blows that registered on the Richter Scale followed at such a speed that only those who knew how to wield the Speed Force could have exceeded it, further enhancing the immense raw brute force at the disposal of Lords Superman. Rage and hate lent him ferocity to go with his strength, and the Cyborg finally fell, his second wind overmatched, and leaving only a sharp scar that exposed part of Lords Superman's bones on his cheek and a streak of bright red blood to show for it.

That and beneath the armor a set of crushingly powerful bruises around his chest and arms and back, and others that he was capable of more than pretending they did not exist, and since their effects were invisible, that only made it easier.

Breathing with a sense of exhaustion, he slumped to his knees, the triumph real, and it was thus that Metropolis's major news station and Jimmy Olsen met him, along with the Diana of his world, whose gaze was that of shock and concern.

"Superman, are you OK?"

His eyes met Jimmy Olsen's, and his smile through bloodied lips with reddened teeth was exhilarated. "Never better."

JUMP CITY, TITANS TOWER:

Watching the TV in the entertainment room of Titans Tower, Kara Zor-El sat upright at the image of her 'cousin' clad in dark armor. She knew immediately that it was not her cousin, he was off-world and there was no telling when he'd be back (and while she resented sometimes, or more than sometimes being the second string she was just as happy to not be anywhere near the ego of Darkseid and Highfather's intensity if it came to it). She had had initial trouble remembering which of the Supermen from the other worlds it was until she saw the dark armor and the muted red of the symbol of the House of El. Then she thought back to which of the universes had had an entire Justice League clad like this and she sat up still straighter and went pale.

She seldom swore, because Clark never did, and he'd rubbed off on her, annoyingly so (unlike Starfire, whose every other word was a swear in her language and she was seen as so sweet and adorable to everyone except Kara, who knew entirely how many ways and how unpleasantly Starfire talked about her friends and more of what laid behind her kindly mask at times). But now, she whistled out a single word, and then levitated upward, deciding she'd need to talk to the other Titans about it. With the League off-world, the Titans were one of the more powerful teams around, minus the Sentinels of Magic (who were absent Raven in this case, but still 'only' had Zatanna, Dr. Fate, John Constantine, and a strange blind man called Mr. E, so they were 'only' a line of defense plenty capable of keeping a lid on things, even if they arrived a mite late to the clash between the heavily armored Superman and his counterpart.

Well, seemingly so (and in practice they'd spent time containing the damage from the multiple worldwide Richter-scale impacts that prevented worldwide tsunamis of the kind that had occurred with the World-Tree Conflict).

The Titans already knew enough and the conversation was quick, and the decisions made equally so. Robin didn't trust her enough to go alone (and she scoffed inwardly, dismissing any idea that she needed the help from a kid whose idea of superhero fashion was dressing up like a Rao-accursed traffic light). So he'd sent, if with great reluctance and batted eyes and an accelerated heartbeat that had Kara not only rolling her eyes but wishing they'd just go ahead and kiss and get it over with, no less than Princess Pottymouth herself.

To be fair, if Starfire got mad, she could pack a punch hard enough for Kara or Kal to feel it, so it wasn't that bad an idea. And....in truth, part of Kara at least liked that there was another alien on the team, someone who got what it was to have a world that wasn't this one and to be all alone, and cut off from that world.

They crossed the United States in an hour, a time slower than their norm, because they just enjoyed flying with each other for company and the eerie lights of cities beneath clouds, the witch-lights that gleamed. It was midnight on a night with trailing clouds when they landed, and Supergirl's eyes met the armored form of the being she would come to call Clark Luthor, for he reminded her of what her cousin might have been if he were raised by Lex Luthor.

His eyes went very wide, his mask dropped for a second, and she could sense a blend of accelerated heartrate and things that made her wish Raven wasn't off-world, as she could interpret all of this better.

"Hello," she said cautiously.

"Kara," said 'Clark' with a smirk.


End file.
